Dell Vostro stops recognising the adapter and charging the battery

The good ol' personal laptop is an HP dinosaur - it has served me for over 6 years now and has taken a massive amount of abuse. That said, it is the equivalent of an automobile held together by duct tape - functional but the sum of its parts is worth way less than each part on its own.

The Office issued me a Dell Vostro 1220 - an uber-basic laptop loaded with security provisions that is halfway decent for word processing, mail-check and a random video viewing. It provides minimal incentive to work on (and that is a very good thing , who likes to lug the monster back home and work after hours). It also has its flaws and plenty of them.

The battery charging for instance - the fickle machine randomly refuses to recognise the Dell adapter provided and this is usually the case when the battery juice has been drained down to under 10% (and when the charging is required the most!!).


Here is a workaround.

1) Get into the Device Manager
2) Disable the Microsoft AC Adapter. 




I have been in hassle-free battery charging mode after this neat trick.

I don't really know what the side-effects are, but it has been over a couple of days and the laptop hasn't exploded yet. So I guess this is ok-to-go.

Now to look forward to a day when we figure out how to stop the annoying jumping-cursor effect (the cursor jumps to a previous line in the document and all your text ends up typed there).......